Satellite image acquisition is well known in the art. Many companies such as DIGITAL GLOBE, GEOEYE, and SPOT IMAGE provide commercial satellite imagery. Existing imaging systems also allow the determination of polygons representing places on earth from satellite and other imagery. For example, geographic information systems (GIS) software tools enable experts to manually draw property lines and create cadastral data sets based on imagery. Unfortunately, polygons are not available for all the targets of interest, and as a result it is often necessary to create new polygons.
Automated image analysis for the determination of non-spatial characteristics is also well known and include examples like optical character recognition, face recognition, and building recognition. However, these systems often suffer inaccuracy and often have to be laboriously tuned, trained, and/or redesigned for each application.
Systems that use human workers connected over the Internet to perform imaging and other computational and analytical functions (referred to as Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) exist, for example, AMAZON's Mechanical Turk and CROWDFLOWER. While using workers provides greater adaption to different images and applications than many automated systems, human workers can be error prone, and their processing output can be slow. Further, specialized training and software tools running on a local computer are required.
Like reference numerals refer to corresponding parts throughout the drawings. The figures depict various embodiments of the present invention for purposes of illustration only. One skilled in the art will readily recognize from the following discussion that alternative embodiments of the structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed without departing from the principles as described herein.